From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

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Wednesday, 19 February 2014

The End is Not Near

The End is Not Near

by J L Schellenberg

Thanks to science, most of us accept the deep past – so why
are our imagined futures so shallow?

In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), Stephen Jay Gould
tells the story of one John Playfair, who in 1788 accompanied the great British
geologist James Hutton to see an ‘unconformity’ at Siccar Point in Scotland.
With the help of this geological visual – an ancient erosion surface dividing
two layers of rock, one gently sloping, the other vertically tilted – Hutton
explained to Playfair that the Earth is a machine ceaselessly repeating a cycle
of erosion, deposition, and uplift. Playfair later wrote: ‘The impression made
will not easily be forgotten... Revolutions still more remote appeared in the
distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by
looking so far into the abyss of time.’

Giddy. That’s how trying to penetrate ‘deep time’ has made
people feel ever since its discovery, by science, a few hundred years ago. With
a little practice, one can contemplate thousands of years, but thinking in the
millions is a bit like staring into a bottomless well or crevasse. No doubt
this has something to do with the name, ‘deep time’.

By now most of us have absorbed and integrated quite a large
number of facts about deep time. We acknowledge that our universe began with
the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. We know that our planet has ‘gone
cycling on’, to use Charles Darwin’s phrase, for about 4.5 billion years.
Darwin himself didn’t know the age of the Earth, and would have been greatly
relieved to hear of it, because natural selection requires hundreds of millions
of years to do its creative work, to produce the vast number of forms that
sprint along the Earth’s surface or splash and soar in its seas and skies. To
the extent we have begun to internalise this idea of deep time, we have started
to make the difficult transition from human timescales to those of science.

This is all well and good, but did you notice that all of
those references to deep time have us looking backward, into history? In most
of our talk about deep time, what we really have in mind is the deep past.
Every day, we are reminded that we come at the end of a long evolutionary
process. But there is little to stimulate the thought that we come at the very
beginning of one, too. Where in all of this, one might reasonably ask, is the
deep future?

It’s helpful to think about these things spatially, so
imagine a line one might draw that is 20ft long, and let that stand for the ‘distance’
of a billion years. A billion years at least is needed to get you all the way
from the first stirrings of human philosophy, science, and religion, about
50,000 years ago, through the immensities of time that lie ahead for species on
our planet, before the Sun’s unbearable drying heat causes the evolution of
life on Earth to grind to a halt. So think about that billion years of
evolution, that 20ft line. How much of it have we traversed?

You’ll suspect it to be not much. But I’m guessing you won’t
be prepared for how little it is. The ground we’ve covered as a species is not
even discernible with our usual measuring devices. Indeed, for it to fill a
visible segment of that 20ft line, say, a meagre eighth of an inch, we would
have to carry on for nearly half a million years more. It takes a great deal
longer than one might think for intelligent life to travel any distance at all
through scientific time, and in that journey we are still disconcertingly close
to the starting point. The beginning is near!

Looking forward from where we are into the abyss of future
time, imagining what yet may be, is not something we’re used to doing. But it’s
something I believe we ought deliberately to do much more often, in order to
correct what amounts to an unbalanced outlook and to discover our place in
time. To see things as they are includes seeing them as they will be, and that
means picturing ourselves and our own position in time not as coming at the
end, jutting out into empty space with nothing beyond, but as tucked in with
manifestations of life both behind us and ahead of us. Tucked in, just as
Darwin’s or Hutton’s time is for us as we look back on it now. This is how
things will be.

Why has recognising the deep future been so difficult for
humanity? Why, after discovering the place of the Earth in the solar system,
the place of the solar system in the universe, the age of the Earth, the age of
the universe, and evolution by natural selection over aeons of Earth’s history,
do we still need to be prodded to perform the simple act of turning around, to
position ourselves to see both forward and back in time?

The first, and most obvious reason, is simple human
self-preoccupation. The line of evolution reaches us, and we find it hard to
imagine it moving further. Hugely impressed with our own accomplishments,
including those just listed, we give little thought to beings who might come
after us or to ideas not yet a twinkle in evolution’s eye. There is also a more
practical reason. Most human goals, including altruistic ones, rise or fall
over the short period of a human lifetime. And although we might look back –
even far back – with interest, perhaps to learn from our kind’s history, there
is nothing in the far future that is similarly tied up with our goals. As a result,
we haven’t developed the habits of mind necessary to consider it carefully.

The past has another kind of allure for us, one tied closely
to the way we see ourselves. When we do lift our heads from immediate human
concerns and exert the imagination needed to think in scientific timescales,
our attention is often drawn in a special way to times gone by. As attested by
hundreds of television programmes, many narrated by the enthusiastic David
Attenborough, things that occurred in the recesses of evolutionary time can
touch us deeply, for they affect our very sense of identity. Having discovered
evolution, we now know that many secrets about who we are might be exposed by
the palaeoanthropologist’s shovel or brush. But there is no bed of deposits
where one can dig up the fossils of one’s descendants.

We all want to
live in the most exciting, most consequential chapter of time, it seems

Finally, we can always blame the Bible. Whether you think of
it as casting a long shadow across the history of Western culture or as
fathering a great light within it, there is no denying the Bible’s powerful
influence on the way that we think today. And you might have noticed that
there’s not much about a billion-year future in it. The Bible does not tell us
‘The beginning is near!’ but rather ‘The end is near!’ When I was a child, I
helped my father put an actual sign at the end of our driveway that said ‘Jesus
is coming soon!’ And although his brand of enthusiastic evangelicalism
sponsored endless disputes with other Christians – even other evangelicals – as
to how things will transpire in the near future, on the matter of whether we
are living in the end times he was in lockstep with other biblical believers.
If you allow for secular eschatologies, he was also in lockstep with the rest
of the culture, which has by now spun out rather a large number of variations
on the biblical Armageddon-just-around-the-corner theme. We all want to live in
the most exciting, most consequential chapter of time, it seems.

What might it mean to shed our temporal myopia? Perhaps we
will learn to think of human enquiry – whether it be philosophical, scientific,
or religious in nature – in a radically diachronic way, as spread out over
enormous periods of time, including future times. This would be a nice
corrective to the tendency thinkers often have to regard enquiry as
identifiable with what’s going on at the moment, and as involving tasks they
and their contemporaries should be able to wrap up in their own lifetimes. In
1900, Lord Kelvin, nearing the end of one of the most productive lives ever in
physics, famously suggested that work in his field was virtually complete: he
could detect only a few ‘minor clouds’ in the otherwise clear sky of physics.
How wrong he was! Within a few years, one cloud had rained down Albert
Einstein’s theory of relativity and the other quantum mechanics. Much of Lord
Kelvin’s classical world lay in ruins.

Perhaps someone will soon discover how to reconcile quantum
mechanics and general relativity – one of the great uncompleted scientific
tasks of our time. But this so-called ‘unification’ might leave loose threads
of its own. Maybe a new awareness of our place in time will lead us to see
science as the laying of foundations, for discoveries that will come long after
we’ve departed the scene. Maybe we will see ourselves as being involved in one
of those critical turning points that can only be seen later on in the journey
of the mind.

A deeper perspective in time might also bless us with a new
attitude toward daring suggestions in the realm of ideas, which today are often
greeted with disdain. I’m thinking of an attitude of tolerant and empathetic
curiosity, fed by the desire to affect our limited intellectual capacities in
ways that permit us to evolve. This empathetic curiosity would motivate us to
understand why things strike someone in the different way they do, while at the
same time preventing us from ridiculing or discouraging unconventional forms of
enquiry that at first appear quixotic.

An illustration is afforded by Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and
Cosmos (2012), which was panned by the intellectual elite for daring to suggest
that a teleological conception of nature might have a role to play in future
science. Teleology was largely set aside when the shift from Aristotle to Isaac
Newton was negotiated: the idea that heavy bodies are drawn toward the centre
of the universe, seen as the centre of the Earth, was dropped when purely
mechanistic systems were devised that accurately predicted and explained a much
wider array of astronomical data than Aristotle ever knew. Teleology remained
outside science when much of what we learnt from Newton was supplanted by
Einstein, and most scientists today suppose it ought to be gone for good. As a
result, Nagel was crucified. But was this swift reaction yet another
consequence of our short-sightedness?

for all we know,
some of the new ideas of the future will be old ideas, whose time has finally
come

It’s true that science and philosophy have limited budgets
(of money and time) and that some filtering of the conversation is necessary to
keep disciplines fresh and on the move. Not every intellectual whimsy can be
indulged. But given our place in time, and our limited understanding, strange
ideas proposed by academics, who to all appearances are full of a love of truth
and have no obvious axe to grind, should be met with curiosity not a curse. We
should at least let Nagel come down from the cross long enough to explain more
fully the teleological view that he thinks might be needed to give
consciousness a place in nature. Realising that our enquiry into the
fundamental nature of the world is just beginning, we might have to say that,
for all we know, some of the new ideas of the future will be old ideas, whose
time has finally come.

For all we know. This critical part of my claim is that we
are not in a realm where belief or confidence is appropriate. It is hard, at an
early stage of any investigation into matters that resist our cognitive powers
and sponsor so much disagreement, to see how belief or confidence could be the
thing to emphasise. Belief says we’ve reached the end of the investigative
journey. And given our place in time, we will often need to resist that siren
call. What’s important is that we voluntarily accept, for now, where our
peculiar pathway through the evidence has led us, and it’s important that we
continue enquiry from there, interacting with the work of others in such habits
of mind as the one I’ve dubbed ‘tolerant, empathetic curiosity’. As it happens,
this point about focusing on acceptance rather than belief means that Nagel was
just as short-sighted to countenance his book’s subtitle Why the Materialist
Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False as were his
detractors in suggesting that teleological ideas are simply beyond the pale and
should be off-limits.

All of these consequences, and many others too, might be
waiting for us in a proper perspective on deep time and our place in it, which
cannot be far off now. None of these consequences – do notice – requires us to
say that intelligent life (whether in a human form or as configured in some
species coming after us) necessarily will travel on a great deal further,
traversing much more of the 20ft line, or that deep new insights will necessarily
be won. In particular, our travels so far through logical space – the space of
ideas – might not be as near a beginning as our travels through temporal space,
scientifically construed. But, by the same token, they might be. Even half the
humility of Darwin will lead you to see that there might be aspects of reality
we’ve not yet evolved the ability to handle intellectually. And so, allow
yourself to get giddy. For all we know, human enquiry on our planet is still in
its infancy.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...